Swipe Right For Unconditional Love: App Pairs You With Adoptable Pets

Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew that whoever you “swiped right” for would love you back, unconditionally?

With the new AllPaws app, that nicety is a reality.

The app, available for iPhone and iPad, helps prospective pet owners filter through adoptable pups and kittens in shelters across the U.S. and Canada to help find their perfect match. For those who don’t use Apple, the main website serves the same purpose.

Darrell Lerner, the app’s founder, describes it as “Very Tinder-like in its interface,” allowing people to swipe easily and quickly through photos and profile details and to easily share the profile on Facebook. They can also contact the shelter directly to inquire about a possible match.

The idea to create AllPaws came after Lerner and his brother founded the development firm Snap Interactive, the parent company of human dating app AreYouInterested. A coworker was trying to find an adoptable dog of her own.

“I said, ‘We can rebuild the same product we’ve spent two years working on–and build a much better version,’” Lerner said.

Adopt-A-Pet and PetFinder are currently the most popular national online search engines, but AllPaws, says Lerner, uses a more modern perspective by utilizing more visible profile characteristics, and a deeper social integration.

They also take a more mobile direction—half of their traffic comes from iPhones and iPads.

While it’s difficult to track adoption rates because they happen “offline,” Lerner can verify that thousands of matches have already been made since the app’s hard launch last October.

The website has topped 500,000 visits per month, 335,000 registered users and displays 204,957 available pets.

“We’ve heard from a number of shelters and rescues that we drive a lot of adoptions to them. They love that we offer a custom Facebook tab which they can run for free to display adoptable pets. So far 500 shelters have installed it.”